Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Of course any word can be overutilized. Massive heart attack, as the author points out, has become a figure of speech, so much so that it would sound strange to use another expression, unless you just want to say someone has had a heart attack without indicating if it was big or small. But I don't have any problem with applying massive to massless objects. You can also apply massless adjectives to objects with mass, such as air head.

Now that is a weighty argument. Weight is defined by physics, roughly, as gravity times mass. So if the heart attack is massive, and there is great gravity to the situation, the weight of the discussion might break the scales.

I think that Freeman is indulging in the lexical equivalent of the celebrity-enters-rehab news story.

I tried to demonstrate my sentiment obliquely in my comment above.

I'm with your comment, samaphore. It's universal. (N.B. here I don't mean to assert that I know it occurs in other galaxies. Nor in other solar systems. Nor even on other planets. I am pretty confident that it occurs globally. Although here I am only considering the human population, so unpopulated areas of the globe, such as the core, would have to be understood as excluded.)